Within a comparatively short time, then, we ought to see many companies organized in this country for aerial transnavigation of the globe by helium airship! Before the year 1919 has come to a close we ought to see aeroplanes and dirigibles jumping the Atlantic from shore to shore. Who knows, it may even come to pass that man shall become as much a creature of the air as the birds! As a world of exploration and travel the heavens offer him many adventures. It presents to him the shortest distance and the line of least resistance between any two given points on this planet. By the aircraft he has already designed he has penetrated to a height of 38,000 feet and flown a thousand miles in a straight line without stopping. Is there any reason to doubt that in a very short time man will extend the capacity of these airships or the distance they can travel? The monetary and laudatory incentives are there. For affording to his fellow man and his chattels faster transportation, man’s reward has been great and commensurate with his success. In order to win that remuneration he has enslaved and domesticated the beasts of the fields; he has harnessed the river and the streams; he has sought out the secrets of nature and devised ways and means to make her hidden forces transport him up and down the highways and byways of the globe; for that reward he has invented machines and engines to rush him over the land and across the seven seas at an ever-increasing rate. When mountains have raised their ponderous bulk between him and his objective he has climbed over them or tunnelled under them or cut them down; when rivers, lakes, or oceans have intervened he has spanned them by bridges or boats; when isthmus or even continents have injected their lengths between him and his markets he has cut them asunder that his ships might pass through. In short, transportation is the life-blood of commerce, and by it and through it the perishable fruits of India, Africa, and America are carried from the tropics to the remotest corners of the frigid zone; likewise the foods or minerals or other materials confined by nature to the temperate zone are taken to the balmy tropics. In fact, every instrument and every force in nature is enslaved so that man may enjoy all the blessings of the earth at one time and in one place. Taken all in all, the speed of transportation has increased man’s pleasures and years proportionately. But how many people to-day realize that when aerial transportation of passengers and freight has become an actual accomplished fact in the sense that water and land transportation of man and his goods now is, a complete redistribution and reconcentration of the cities, people, and nations and a new internationalism in the form of customs and language will have become a historic fact! This statement may seem like an absurd phantasy, but if history repeats itself in the future as it has in the past this will take place as surely as the sun rises.